Talk:Mystic Sorcery/@comment-6069614-20170125163756/@comment-26851283-20170126173759
Since this is such a fun topic to discuss... Patterns certainly exist. And gambling is more determined by probability than patterns. The difference is that probability is a spectrum. The higher the probability the more likely something happens. Patterns are binary. It either exists or it does not. Something that happens 80% of the time isn't a pattern (and if it's being called one it shouldn't be) it is something that happens with high probability. To be a pattern, something has to be consistently replicable. Here is an example: "Coin flips average out to 50% heads if you flip an unweighted coin infinite number of times." can be considered a pattern. If you run mock simulations side by side, they should all asymtote out to 50/50 eventually. "Out of 100 coin flips you should get 50 heads." is a probability statement, not a reliable pattern. Depending on chance you could be wrong any number of times. The results are not reliable replicable. What LegoTech is talking about is the false perception of patterns in things that are actually random. I don't think he's presumptuous enough to state that patterns do not exist in general. The fallacy of false patterns can be explained in quite a number of ways psychologically. Most of it has to do with human tendency towards heuristics. The way I like to explain it is that a false pattern is a localized probability statement that has been mistakenly labeled as a pattern. In short a pattern doesn't exist until it can be consistently proven and not consistently disproven. "Noticing a pattern" should probably more accurately be called "noticing a probability". It's similar to the distinction between a theory and a law, or perhaps even closer to the distinction between a hypothesis and a rule. Anyhow, feel free to entertain whatever superstitions you have about increasing your favor with the RNGoddess, or you can step in to the bleak reality of realization that it all doesn't matter because it really is random. BTW, as much as I personally also like to calculate the odds of my bad luck (and I certainly have my fair share of it) I also realize that it too has very little meaning. The fact that the odds of what you just experienced is 1 in 28billion does not at all mean it's impossible to be random (as many may believe). More than likely it just means some other people are having ridiculously 1 in millions odds luck streaks. The beauty and horror of RNG is that there is no absolute cap for probability of occurance. If something that should happen 50% of the time doesn't happen 9 million times in a row, it is still plausibly working as intended (somewhere down the line maybe it will happen 9 million times in a row who knows). So how do we know if RNG is functionally broken? When do we report a bug? Well, in that sense these wiki discussions are actually helpful and more than just a forum to shame people who are superstitious or join cults. If something that should happen (even at a low probability) is simply not happening for anyone over a long stretch of time, the theory that the RNG is indeed broken is strengthened and the devs should look into their implementation of RNG. But this is only applicable when something literally does not work for anyone. For things that a select group of people are experiencing, it's hard to call the shots on whether its superstition or a functional error (except in some cases with common sense). I will admit that implementations of random chance in digital technology are not perfect. In fact RNG packages are more accurately called pseudo-random generators. That is because it is physically impossible for mechanical or electrical parts to be random. If and when we get the quantum computer that may be a different case. However, most modern implementations are both convincingly random and pretty easy to use (as in it's pretty hard to screw up implementing a good pseudo-random generator) so really the chances of RNG being functionally broken is pretty low. That should influence the decision made on whether something is superstition or a bug (at least if we're using the realm of logic instead of emotion to guide our decisions).